There is a liquid crystal lens device including a liquid crystal optical unit that changes the distribution of the refractive index according to the application of a voltage by utilizing the birefringence of liquid crystal molecules. There is a drive device for driving the liquid crystal optical unit. Also, there is an image display apparatus that combines the liquid crystal lens device and the image display unit.
By changing the distribution of the refractive index of the liquid crystal optical unit, the image display apparatus switches between a state in which the image displayed by the image display unit is caused to be incident on the eyes of a human viewer as displayed by the image display unit and a state in which the image displayed by the image display unit is caused to be incident on the eyes of the human viewer as multiple parallax images. Thereby, a two-dimensional image display operation and a three-dimensional image display operation are realized. High display quality is necessary for such an image display apparatus.